Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, visual sound poetry for iPhone

As Geoff Huth wrote, “we are living through what might be the greatest age of visual poetry, in a time when the methods of production and distribution are such that the form can prosper without the need for extensive capital”. A convergence of factors, including the Internet, print-on-demand publishing, and an increasing interest in the visual and textual,-has allowed this hybrid form to flourish across the planet. Therefore, there is nothing suprising about finding one of Jörg Piringer’s creations among the most rated iphone apps. Piringer is an Austrian “visual sound poet” and a founding member of the Institute for Transacoustic Research. He has recently released an application for iPhone and iPod touch called abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz whose main ingredients are typography, motion and sound. According to its creator it is “a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right”. The design is very simple, with a white screen flanked by the alphabet, plus a set of basic buttons above and below. A slider at the top gives the option of selecting the type of vocal sound (Gravity, Crickets, Vehicles or Birds). User simply drag a letter on to the play area and depending on which type you’ve selected on the slider, the letter will act in a certain way and make its own sound. The combination generates a unique and interactive sound ecology. Additional settings include the ability to take a photo of the screen resulting in a still frame of what has just been performed. It looks like Piringer has found the perfect support for his niche of researching vocal sounds and their relation to dynamic typography in a highly popular and commercial device.